3:30–4:30 pm Maria Goeppert-Mayer Lecture Hall
Hunting for Heavy Dark Matter in 2020s
" Non chi comincia ma quel che persevera"
Luca Grandi, University of Chicago
Dark Matter (DM) is out there, but its nature is still a mystery. The field of DM direct detection has been extremely lively and successful in the last three decades, bringing to fruition a wide variety of low-background particle techniques that allowed the exploration of more than 7 orders of magnitude in the relevant parameter space, down to ultra-faint couplings of DM with ordinary matter. Heavy Dark Matter, despite escaping detection to date, remains a very well-motivated candidate and a high priority target for the field, but to improve over the status quo reached at the end of last decade, the community had to face several challenges while developing extremely ambitious multi-tonne experimental programs. In this context, I will introduce you to the two projects that I am directly involved in, XENONnT and DarkSide-20k, designed to explore even fainter couplings of DM with ordinary matter. The XENONnT experiment, featuring 6 tonnes of xenon as target for DM, is presently acquiring data, having already released a first set of results that I will present. On the other side, the DarkSide-20k experiment, featuring an active mass of 50 tonnes of special underground argon, is presently completing the design phase and approaching construction.